Major Annoyance with the System tray | The Coffeehouse

mig
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. - Evelyn Waugh

So it's 2007 and we're at another Windows release with Vista. Why is it that an Explorer crash still wipes the icons in the system tray?
Obviously since the taskbar lives within Explorer, but what I am asking is why hasn't there been a "middle man" established to house the tray icons and display them? And possibly have the system tray "plug into" this middle man (whatever its implementation may be) to display an 'unchanged' system tray in the event of an Explorer crash.

Also, as a sidenote I think at one point in time before the "Reset" the system tray icons were living in the sidebar (or did my memory completely miss on that?) If that was the case, I suspect that the sidebar taking on a slightly different role had something to do with deciding to keep the system tray in the taskbar, but why wasn't what I suggested above implemented?

I hope I am not the only one that shares this frustration.

DigitalDud

Of course a better solution would be a stable Explorer. Smiley

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Explorer actually broadcasts a message when the task bar is created. Well-behaved applications should recreate their tray icons in response to this message. The .Net NotifyIcon class properly responds to this message.

And for the record, the system tray is not actually called the system tray. It's the "notification area". The name "system tray" comes from early Windows 95 builds, and the thing it called the system tray never made it into Win95 final.

mig
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. - Evelyn Waugh

Sven Groot wrote:
Explorer actually broadcasts a message when the task bar is created. Well-behaved applications should recreate their tray icons in response to this message. The .Net NotifyIcon class properly responds to this message.

And for the record, the system tray is not actually called the system tray. It's the "notification area". The name "system tray" comes from early Windows 95 builds, and the thing it called the system tray never made it into Win95 final.

Agreed that well behaved applications "should" do something, however after reading Raymond Chen's blog I've come to the conclusion that those days came to an end when Microsoft stopped trusting developers to do "the right thing". So why doesn't Microsoft come up with a better solution for the problem? They've shimmied applications for less (granted those were compatibility shimmies, but this is something that could actually improve functionality), and providing a solution for this annoyance while I will admit probably isn't too high (if at all) on that list of things to do in the shell, would make most people less annoyed. Also, I had to google search to find that out what the broadcast message was, you'd think they would add it as a remark somewhere in the Win32 documentation (if they did I missed it entirely).

And thanks for pointing the official name of "system tray", ironically I probably read Raymond's article on it, I guess old habits die hard Wink

Btw: How are you liking Japan?

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

That's definitely true.

One simple workaround you can try is to go to the folder options, view tab, and check "Launch folder windows in a separate process". That way when an folder window crashes, only that particular folder window will go down. The taskbar and other explorer windows would be unaffected.

As another tip, you can check the event log whenever explorer crashes, and see what the "faulting module" was. In many cases(*) it'll belong to some explorer add-in and not explorer itself. Once you know which add-in is responsible, you may be able to try and remove or disable it.

(*) Not in all cases, though, I'm not trying to claim explorer itself is flawless. Although even a crash in explorer itself can be caused by an add-on; a simple way to do that is an add-on freeing/releasing an object that belongs to explorer, causing explorer to crash when it wants to use that object later.

mig
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. - Evelyn Waugh

Sven Groot wrote:

One simple workaround you can try is to go to the folder options, view tab, and check "Launch folder windows in a separate process". That way when an folder window crashes, only that particular folder window will go down. The taskbar and other explorer windows would be unaffected.

I already do this, my crashes are often caused by me doing things through the start menu (like moving a folder from one submenu to another), I do this becasue I am lazy and take advantage of the "Show personal folder as menu" feature.

Sven Groot wrote:

As another tip, you can check the event log whenever explorer crashes, and see what the "faulting module" was. In many cases(*) it'll belong to some explorer add-in and not explorer itself. Once you know which add-in is responsible, you may be able to try and remove or disable it.

Do this as well, at the moment the only add-ons I have running are shell extensions, I previously had some trouble with TortoiseSVN and removed it, however I wish there was an alternative to it that actually worked because I am stuck using Anhksvn which isn't too bad for most of my version control tasks now.